September 28, 1999

Chris Ofili: British Artist Holds Fast to His Inspiration

By CAROL VOGEL

hris Ofili is hunkered down in his
central London studio, screening the avalanche of phone calls he has been getting
for the last few days and trying not to
obsess about the uproar over "The Holy
Virgin Mary," his 1996 painting of a
black Madonna with a clump of elephant
dung on one breast and cutouts of genitalia from pornographic magazines in the
background.

Eamonn McCabe

The London artist Chris Ofili , the London artist, says the excitement in New York over his painting ``The Holy Virgin Mary'' ``seems very distant.''

"It all seems very distant and confusing to me," Ofili said. "It's like a
play, and somehow I got mentioned in the
script. I think there's some bigger agenda here."

His painting is part of "Sensation:
Young British Artists From the Saatchi
Collection," scheduled to open at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art on Saturday.
When Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani threatened to cut off the museum's city subsidy
and remove its board if the show was not
canceled, he singled out "The Holy Virgin Mary," along with several other
works, as "sick stuff."

John Cardinal O'Connor called the
show an attack on religion itself. The
Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights said it found Ofili's painting
offensive, too. After seeing a photograph
of "The Holy Virgin Mary" in the exhibition's catalogue, the league's president,
William A. Donohue, issued a statement
saying people should picket the museum.

Asked yesterday to explain his "Holy
Virgin Mary," Ofili said in a telephone interview: "I don't feel as though I
have to defend it. The people who are
attacking this painting are attacking
their own interpretation, not mine. You
never know what's going to offend people, and I don't feel it's my place to say
any more."

In interviews since he won the Turner
Prize for young British artists last year,
Ofili spoke broadly about his unconventional approach to art, including his
use of elephant dung and his Roman
Catholic upbringing.

The British-born artist talked about
his African heritage, which led him to
visit Zimbabwe, where he was disturbed
by the remnants of colonialism he encountered and was moved by the beauty
of the land and its wildlife, he said.

From the ``Sensation'' exhibition catalogue, Thames & Hudson, 1997

``The Holy Virgin Mary,'' a painting by Chris Ofili, is part of the "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

While Ofili's painting is the one
most frequently mentioned in criticism of
the Brooklyn show, other works that have
drawn fire also use organic materials, including a shark suspended in a tank of
formaldehyde, a bust of a man made from
his own frozen blood and a folded-over mattress with a water bucket, melons and a
cucumber standing between a pair of oranges.

This isn't the first time that Ofili, 31,
has found himself in the center of a hailstorm. After he won the Turner Prize, the
$32,000 award given annually by the Tate
Gallery of Art in London, several London
critics denounced the choice as gimmicky
and dubbed Ofili the Elephant Man.

But he said that this time he felt besieged
by the public outcry because he and his
work had been singled out.

Ofili, who has a master's degree from
the Royal College of Art in London, is widely
known in the art world, and his work is in the
permanent collection of the Victoria and
Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in
London and the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan.

Elephant dung, which has become something of a signature in Ofili's paintings,
is in large part a cultural reference to his
African heritage, he said. Although he was
born in Manchester, both his parents were
born in Lagos, Nigeria, and their first language was Yoruba. (His parents are now
divorced, Ofili said.

Both work in biscuit
factories, his mother in Manchester and his
father in Nigeria.)

He describes himself as a churchgoing
Catholic, although he does not attend every
Sunday. Ofili went to state schools in
Manchester and became interested in furniture design before gravitating to art.

When he was 24 he decided to learn more
about his roots. He won a scholarship to
travel and paint for eight weeks in Zimbabwe.

"I was struck by the beauty of the landscape and of the animals in their natural
surroundings," he said. "When a giraffe
taller than the average house in Britain
would walk by, it gave me that particular
feeling of being shocked and simultaneously
finding something beautiful. It gave me an
excitement and a fear of the new."

In Zimbabwe, he said, he was aware of its
colonial past. There were still signs calling
the nation Rhodesia, he said, and he encountered colonialist behavior among some of
the people there, both black and white.

His use of elephant dung, which he gets
from the London Zoo, is in many ways a
reaction to what he saw and felt in Africa, he
said.

While news reports have described his
paintings as being splattered with dung, the
clumps are actually carefully placed on
each canvas. In one painting a clump of
dung is a jeweled brooch encrusted with
gold sparkles on a goddess; in another it is
an abstract element floating in a densely
painted background. In yet another five
balls of dung descend in a line, each with a
letter formed from colored pins spelling out
the name Rodin. Many of the works rest on
two large clumps of dung, which act almost
as feet.

"It's a way of raising the paintings up
from the ground and giving them a feeling
that they've come from the earth rather
than simply being hung on a wall," he said.

Most of Ofili's works are vibrantly
colored and use multiple layers of dots
(inspired, he said, by images from ancient
caves in Zimbabwe).

He frequently uses
cutouts of circles reminiscent of 1960's Op
Art or of triangles, based on a set of etchings
he made while visiting New York.

His oil
paintings often include images cut from
magazines, comic-book-like characters and
splashes of translucent resin.

While he has detractors, the Victoria Miro
Gallery on Cork Street in London and Gavin
Brown Enterprises in Manhattan, the two
galleries that represent him, report they
have waiting lists for collectors demanding
his work. One painting sold last year for
$36,052 at Christie's in London.

"I was an underbidder on some of those
paintings at Christie's," said Dean Valentine, president and chairman of UPN Network and a collector.

"Of all the young
British painters I think he's by far the best.
The paintings have a depth of expression.
He has something to say."

Valentine admitted that at first the
elephant dung did give off an unpleasant
odor. "It took some work to air it out," he
said. "He's not trying to offend but to make
you think."

Gavin Brown, who first showed Ofili's
work in 1995, said he believed the uproar at
the Brooklyn Museum "doesn't bear any
relation to his art."

"Paintings aren't offensive," Brown
added. "They don't kill people."

This fall is to be a big moment for
Ofili in the United States. He has been
chosen as one of the 41 artists whose work
will be shown in the Carnegie International,
a survey of contemporary art that opens at
the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh
on Nov. 6.

On Oct. 16 Brown is mounting a
second show of Ofili's work, five new
paintings that are to together being called
"Afrobiotics."

Ofili said he was concerned about his
notoriety.

"I find it off-putting that people
judge you before they know you," he said.

While he liked being included in "Sensation," he said he worried about being seen as
one of the Young British Artists and not as
an individual.

"People see me as part of a package," he
said. "It scares me."

During an interview in his London studio
in August, Ofili worked on two paintings
at once. The larger of the two was of a
character he calls "magic monkey" holding
up an empty turquoise vessel.

He said the
monkey was trying to capture the three
powerful elements of life: sex, money and
drugs, which are represented by three separate clumps of elephant dung bearing the
three words formed out of straight pins with
colored tops that he buys at his local grocery store.

The painting's surface was thick with
beads of paint applied with a thin stick that
is actually a brush that has no hairs on it.
Using the kinds of aluminum containers
that Chinese takeout food comes in, Ofili
mixed the paint to a consistency he described as cream. He spread layer upon
layer of glitter, besides the painted dots. On
top of that he applied coats of translucent
resin to give the surface a transparency.

"That's to make it seem that in some
ways it's more imagined than real," he said.

Across the room was another painting, its
background three-quarters finished.

Ofili applied large black and white spirals
with a thin brush.

"I think I roughly know what I'm doing,"
he said, moving from the magic monkey to
the black spirals.

"It might be a female
portrait.

I need a princesslike figure."

He likened the process to writing a song.
"You know the lyrics," he said.

"Then you
want to get the right rhythm and base line."

Outside the entrance to his London studio
that day, several teen-agers huddled together smoking crack. Above their heads was a
sign warning, "This area is being constantly
watched and patrolled by the Lord."

Ofili said he made the sign because he
wanted the addicts who regularly used his
doorway to think about what they were
doing.

"I was brought up a Catholic and was an
altar boy," he said.

"I believe in God, but
I'm not dominated by it.

We all studied
math, but we don't go around spewing numbers. Religion should be used in the appropriate way."

"The church is not made up of one person
but a whole congregation, and they should
be able to interact with art without being
told what to think," he continued.

"This is all about control," he added.
"We've seen it before in history. Sadly, I
thought we'd moved on."